The main source
of information about “Mary Linley Taylor” is her autobiography, published by
her son after her death, Chain of Amber (Guildford, UK: The Book Guild.
1992). The main problem with this book is the almost complete absence of dates,
it is impossible to know when most of the events she relates took place. What
is certain is that the stories she tells about events leading to her marriage and
also about their house in Seoul, Dilkusha, are very different from the version Faith
Norris gives with such confidence in Dreamer in Five Lands. Her life was much more full of adventures
than Joan Grigsby’s, in part no doubt because of her very different
personality, and the relative wealth of her husband. Her attitude toward Korea
and the Korean people, developed over many years, is remarkably accepting and
generous; she explains how her husband helped her in the early days and it is
sure that the Koreans around them reciprocated the affection and respect they
showed.

"Mary
Linley" was the stage name
taken by Hilda Mouat Biggs at the start of her acting career in about
1912, and after her marriage she seems always to have called herself
Mary (Linley) Taylor. She was born on September 14, 1889, at her parents' home in Abbey Row, Westport, Malmesbury. Her birth was belatedly registered in Malmesbury in
June
1890, and that of her
younger
brother Ronald was registered in December the same year. The birth of Ethel,
the sister she calls “Betty” in Chain of Amber (p49) was registered there in June
1888, while those of her younger brother Eric and her younger sister
Una (who later lived with her in Korea and California) were
registered in Cheltenham in September 1896 and March 1898,while the family were living at 2, Fauconberg Villas, Cheltenham. On the
headstone in Hillcrest
Cemetery, Mendocino, Mendocino County, California, where Mary Linley
Taylor and
Una Mouat Biggs share a grave, their birth dates are given as 1889 and
1897. Their parents
were Dr. Charles Edward Forbes Mouat-Biggs and Mary Louisa Tickell, who were
married in Cheltenham on July 5, 1887. The Tickell family line is a complex one, needing to be developed on a separate page.

Regarding Mary's paternal grandfather, there is a record online that John Peter Mouat Biggs
joined the army in India in 1836 and on 8 Oct 1839was promoted lieutenant in theThirty-Eighth
Regiment Native Infantry (Rifle Company). Captain John Peter Mouat Biggs of the Madras Infantry was appointed Major on
April 17, 1857. Much later, the April 7, 1861, census of Guernsey (Channel Islands) shows this same
John Biggs (there is not enough room on the printed form for the full
names) living with his family at 1 Paxton Place, St. Peter Port. He
himself (Major Retired, HMEIS, aged 41) was born in Agra (?) East
Indies but his wife Sarah (only 26) had been born in Ireland (1881 census says Dublin). Her
unmarried sister Margaret Forbes (34) was living with them, and she was
born in Calcutta. (The 'Forbes' in Hilda's father's name is
therefore his mother's maiden name.) They had 4 children at the time,
the eldest a son, John W. (12, born in Nursingpore, India), Mary (9,
born in Hampstre?, India) and Jane (2, born in Guernsey), as well as a
son Charles E. aged 8 months, Hilda's future father, born therefore in
1860. The
1891 census of England confirms that Hilda's father was indeed born in
Guernsey (Channel Islands).

In 1863, we find a report that "Major
John Peter Mouat Biggs of Chemainus” was briefly appointed "justice of the peace for
Chemainus and Salt Spring Island," where a series of violent murders had occurred. Chemainus
is on Vancouver Island, Canada. It is very hard not to think he
was Mary’s grandfather, Charles’s father, but equally hard to
understand such a radical move away from retirement in Guernsey. A recent book, The Terror of the Coast: land alienation and colonial war on Vancouver Island
and the Gulf Islands, 1849-1863, by Chris Arnett (Talonbooks, 1999), a detailed reconstruction of the war between the
First Nations and the colonial government of Vancouver Island, says that a local commander, named Douglas,
"appointed as Justice of the Peace Major John Peter Mouat Biggs, a retired
East India Company officer who had recently preempted land on the Chemainus
Prairie." He had presumably found life in Guernsey too restricted and begun a new adventure in Canada. By the
time of the 1881 census he had died and his widow was living at
50 Cambridge Gardens, Kensington, London with May (a daughter born 1852
in Madras from John Peter's first marriage), Jane and Charles (already
a 'student of medicine'), and her sister Margaret (noted as
'daughter of Major General,' suggesting he was Major-General
William Forbes, 1796-1855, of the Bengal Engineers, designer of St.
Paul's Cathedral, Calcutta).

When
he was 11, Hilda's father entered Wellington College, at least for the
year 1873-4. In 1884 he was living at 62, Westbourne Park, Paddington,
when he became a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians. On the day of the 1891 census, the family was living in a house
named Milverton, 17 Abbey Row, Westport, in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, where Hilda's father was
working as a 'general practitioner' (family doctor). He was then 30. Soon after that they moved to Cheltenham. In 1899, he became a member of the Clinical Society of London. Mary’s father’s name is on a monument in Cheltenham
listing all who served in South Africa as volunteers during the Boer War
(1899-1902), "2nd. Volunteer Brigade Gloucestershire Regiment Capt. C.E.F.
Mouat-Biggs," and he is recorded as having sailed from Southampton on February
17, 1900, on board the Guelph.
Mary Taylor’s book includes a photo of
the imposing house, Milverton, where the family lived in Cheltenham. It
later became a hotel
and then the headquarters of a food company. The 1901 census shows that
on that day, Hilda and Ethel were both boarding with Louisa E. Tickell
(aged 70, 'living on own means,' their maternal grandmother) in a large
boarding house known as Ashburnham House, Clarence Parade, Portsmouth,
(then part of the county of Southampton) that was run by 3 sisters by
the name of Thorn. Their mother, with Eric and Eva and a cook, 2
housemaids and a nurse, were living at Milverton in Cheltenham. We do
not know why the family was divided in this way. In
1913, Charles Edward Forbes Mouat-Biggs was enrolled at the Liverpool
School of Tropical Medicine and in later years he published a number of
papers on topics indicating an interest in scorpions and in Nicaragua.

Mary’s
silence about her father’s family is frustrating since she explains
nothing about the family's international background. She simply says
that among
visitors to the house were “soldiers, sailors, big game hunters,
explorers and
scientists,” including the explorer Captain Scott. The house was full
of exotic
objects from Africa as well as the East, China as well as India. Most
telling,
though, is her mention of the arrival of a huge elephant’s foot, “the
largest
elephant ever shot in India,” shot by her father and others on the
Maharaja of
Patiala’s shikar. Another of the feet had been sent to King Edward VII,
no less! That being the case, the Maharaja in question can be identified as Bhupinder
Singh, “best
known for his extravagance, and for being a cricketer.” He had become
Maharja
in 1900, on the death of his father, “a Council of Regency ruled in his
name
until he took partial powers shortly before his 18th birthday on 1
October
1909, and was invested with full powers by the Viceroy of India, the
4th Earl
of Minto, on 3 November 1910.” Mary’s family had high connections in
India, perhaps more from the Tickell side than from the Mouat Biggs.The Mouat Biggs family

Mouat
Biggs
is an extremely unusual name. Hilda's family is almost the only known
example, and although Hilda's father hyphenated it in legal documents,
in fact "Mouat" was almost certainly not part of the legal family name;
although the
children of several generations were all registered with it, the legal
name was simply
Biggs.

Going back
one generation,
we find that on 16 Feb 1817,
the India Office Ecclesiastical Returns-Bengal Presidency registered the birth
of Barbara
Achmuty Mouat Biggs, daughter of J. A. Biggs and his wife Barbara. No
further
information is given, but it is very tempting to think that the
mother’s maiden
name was Mouat and that they decided to give both their names to their
children. This would seem
to be the origin of the Mouat-Biggs line. John Peter Mouat Biggs would then have been a younger brother
(born
1820) of Barbara Achmuty. The 68-year-old (now widowed) mother of John (Peter
Mouat) Biggs, Barbara, (68, Gent(leman) Officer's Widow, born in
England) was living with John Biggs and his family (2 sons, 2 daughters) in Guernsey at the census in
1861.

Another son of J. A. Biggs and Barbara, James Andrews Mouat Biggs, died in Cheltenham on October 26, 1887, reportedly aged 57, having been born in 1830 (but another record says he was born in 1824) in Cawnpore, India. He left for India from Southampton on the
Hindustan in January 1848 as a cadet. The London Gazette of April 17, 1863, records that "Lieutenant James Andrews
Mouat Biggs of the Bengal army, late of the 10th Native Infantry, having
completed 15 years' service, is to become Captain by brevet." His death certificate records the final rank of "Colonel, Bengal Staff Corps." At the end of his career, at the 1881 census he was living in Bideford (Devon) with
his wife (Augusta Monnat, born in Ireland 1837) and 3 children (2
daughters born in the Punjab in 1863, 1868, and one son, Ernest, aged 9, who
died 03/05/1916 in the Somme during the first World War, a Second
Lieutenant in the Lincolnshire Regiment, named on the Torquay war memorial,
who was born in Cheltenham in 1872). One of his sons (name unknown), born in April 1865, studied for a time at Cheltenham
College(date unknown). The death of James Andrews Mouat Biggs was registered by his son J. M. Mouat Biggs of Bideford, probably the J. Mouat Biggs (age unknown) who was studying at Newton Abbot College (Devon) in 1877-80.John Alborough Mouat-Biggs,
Captain Royal Irish Regiment, who was killed in the first World War
22/03/1918 aged 22, and is buried at Honnechy (France) was perhaps
another son
of this family. Curiously, the death certificate for James Andrews
Mouat Biggs indicates that he died at The Lypiatts, Cheltenham, which
was (until it was sold in 1904) the address of the Tickell family. The
wedding of his brother Charles Edward Forbes Mouat-Biggs had been
celebrated in Cheltenham in July of that year, and the certificate says
he had been suffering from an abdominal cancer for the previous 6
months, so perhaps he had come up from Bideford for the wedding, then
stayed on. We have no information as yet on the nature of the
relationship between the Tickells and the Mouat-Biggs prior to the
wedding. The shared India connections might have brought them close.

The
only other traceable person with the Mouat-Biggs name outside of
Hilda's immediate family is 'Tim' Edward Mouat-Biggs (1919-1997),
"After 22 years in the South African Air Force Tim founded his own
aviation workshop. He flew cropsprayers and dabbled in aerial
photography on the side. But most of all, Tim will be remembered for
his deep devotion to gliding. Having built and flown his own gliders,
he subsequently became the agent for Schempp-Hirth in South Africa. A
South African and Rhodesian (Zimbabwe) national champion many times
over, Tim represented his country at several World Gliding
Championships with distinction." He died in a mid-air collision while
gliding. His brother might have been the John Mouat-Biggs who died in
South Africa in 1946, and they were both perhaps sons of Hilda's
brother Ronald, himself a military officer during and after the first
World War.
A "Mouat-Biggs J." is among the second world war Commonwealth dead
buried in Padua, he was perhaps a brother of this Edward. In 1959, we
read that "Ronald Mouat-Biggs, High-Wycombe garages superintendent of
the Thames Valley Traction Co., Ltd., for 30 years, has retired."

Mary the actress meets Bruce the
miner

At the
start of the war in 1914, she says, her father and brothers joined the armed
forces, her mother took up nursing. One of Mary’s mother’s cousins was the
actor Sir Charles Hawtrey; Sir Charles’s father was the Reverend John Hawtrey,
master of the lower school at Eton College. She went to London, where she was
supposed to ask him to help her find work in the theatre, her chosen career,
but instead she auditioned with Sir Beerbohm Tree and began to tour in England.
Then she was offered the chance of going on a tour through “India, Ceylon,
Malaya, China and Japan.” She looked up relatives (unnamed, alas) in India,
then in Burma she met another of her mother’s cousins, who was in the teak
trade. From there, via Hong Kong, she arrived in Japan and when she arrived in
Yokohama, she learned of the death in action of her brother Eric.

The actors were invited
to a party at the beach at Homoko and there she first met “Bruce Taylor.” Bruce’s father, George
Alexander Taylor had come to Korea in the later 1890s, started a gold mine in Unsan in
what is now North Korea, and died in 1908. His son Bruce (real names Albert Wilder Taylor) took over the
mine and also bought another mine near Cheonan, south of Seoul. Albert’s
brother Bill was also living in Korea, working with him

Mary
tells that on their first meeting he saved her from drowning while swimming in
stormy seas, although she was very athletic. She makes it plain that they were
attracted strongly at first sight. Back in Yokohama, he was to watch her act,
and in the taxi on the way to the theatre gave her a very fine Korean amber
(hat-)chain. Then he went back to his mining in Korea, she followed the tour
back to India.

Mary writes:
“many of my family had been associated with India ever since the forming of the
East india Company, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.” One great-
(great-?)uncle had been awarded the Star of India, she says, and a
great-great-grandmother was born in the dungeon of the Residence during the
Indian Mutiny while her grandfather, then a young cavalry officer, has delayed
the advance of the rebels at Dilkusha near Lucknow. If only she had written
their names! She says that she rode out to see the ruins of Dilkusha (see pictures at the foot of this page) and there decided she
would give the name (Heart’s Delight) to her own house when she had one. Ten
months after they had left Yokohama, Bruce Taylor arrived in Calcutta to join
her, and proposed that evening. They were married (at last, a date!) on 15
June, 1917, in St. Thomas’s Cathedral in Bombay. That evening she acted for the
last time, in Charlie’s Aunt, and Bruce was sitting in a box with
Rabidranath Tagore. She explains (p108) that her husband, whose name was Albert
Wilder Taylor, disliked the name and was always called Bruce by his close
friends. Confusingly, their son was given the names Bruce Tickell.

First years in Korea

After
several months of relaxed traveling, they arrived in Pusan, then by train to
Seoul. Bruce’s brother Bill had vacated his own home in a rural area near Sŏdaemun (West Gate) for them. Soon she was
an active member of the Seoul Club. Walking along the old city walls, they once
found a spot on a hillside where a huge gingko tree was growing, a fine spot
for a house. Bruce said the land there belonged to a non-resident Englishman.

The story continues wth first
visits to the gold mine in North Korea, and to the Diamond Mountain. It is
during this second journey that Mary first realizes the intensity of Korean
longing for freedom from Japanese rule, thanks in part to a Korean university
student who offers to serve as their guide. Then Bruce explains that there is
already an army in exile up in Manchuria, and that the monks in the temples
they are visiting are also involved. At the same time, during the journey Mary
is at last exposed to Korean ways of living, and finally comes to her first
taste of Kimchi. It is still only 1918, and in February 1919, Mary goes into
Severance Hospital for the birth of her child.

A representative
of the US news agency Associated Press asked Bruce to cover the funeral of the
Korean Emperor Kojong, who had died amid rumors that he was poisoned by the
Japanese rulers. The funeral was scheduled for March 3, 1919, four days after
Albert's first son, Bruce, was born at Seoul's Severance Hospital. On Feb. 28,
1919, after reporting about the large crowds of Koreans who had gathered to
prepare for the funeral, Albert rushed to the hospital to see his newborn
child. He picked him up, and saw copies of the Korean Declaration of
Independence hidden in his wife’s bed. They had been thrust there by a nurse to
hide them from Japanese soldiers. That day was the eve of the historic March 1,
1919, anti-Japanese rebellion by Koreans, who were angered by the sudden,
mysterious death of their emperor and also inspired by US President Woodrow
Wilson's speech supporting the right to self-determination by small countries.

The Taylors did
not know that Severance Hospital was being used by Korean independence leaders to
hide their printing press, but in this way he accidentally obtained an advance copy
of the declaration in the hospital room of his wife and son. Bruce asked his
brother Bill to take a copy of the document to Japan hidden in his shoe. There
it was cabled to AP in New York to avoid local censorship. Thus he became the
first Western journalist to report on the Korean independence movement
worldwide. The next day, hundreds of thousands of Koreans took part in street
protests demanding independence from Japan. Then, in the days following the
uprising, Bruce photographed the Japanese police as they set fire to a small
church in the village of Jaeam-ri near Suwon, south of Seoul, in which a group
of Korean peasants were locked. Twenty-three people burned to death in the
fire. U.S. Vice Consul-General Raymond Curtis and American missionary leader
Horace H. Underwood saw the photos and protested to Japanese Governor-General
Hasegawa Yoshimichi, threatening worldwide publicity of the carnage The next
day's newspaper headlines read, "Hasegawa regrets," and more possible
mass killings were stopped. Bruce also compiled detailed reports about the many
patriots who were killed at that time, and Faith gave a copy of his lists to
President Syngman Rhee when she brought his ashes to Seoul in 1948.

Mary’s sister Una lost a leg as a result
of an accident during the war. She came to join the staff at the mine in 1919,
at a time when anti-American feeling was strong since the United States had
done nothing to support the Korean demands for independence. They left Seoul to
spend the summer in Wŏnsan. In the autumn, they were able to help rescue a
group of White Russian refugees, just after Bruce had witnessed the attempt on
Baron Saito in front of Seoul Stationon September 2, 1919!

Dilkusha

At last Bruce obtained the land around the
Gingko tree, and they realized that there would be a problem since the whole
area was a site for shamanistic prayers, and the wells provided the nearby
houses with water. The local people tried to prevent the builders’ carts from
passing up the narrow streets, and a shaman even cursed the house, saying it
would be burned down. The cornerstone with the name Dilkusha is dated 1923.
This would normally be laid bear the start of building. On pp191-4 there is a
detailed description of the completed house, which was full from top to bottom
with beautiful treasures of Korean art and furniture. Bruce has a magnificent
collection of Koryŏ celadon and many other rare objects, houses on the third
floor in a special room. From the upper floors, bridges led to the hillside
behind, to allow bath water to be brought in and permit rapid escape if needed.
The first guest to enter the completed house was Mary’s mother from England.
They also invited Bishop Trollope to come to bless the house, just in case.

From this point, the chronology becomes
important, and rather difficult to establish. We know that the house’s
cornerstone was laid in 1923, then the building was delayed for several months
because the whole frontage had to be pulled down and rebuilt (she had fiddled with the
strings whenthe
foundation was being
laid). She says that it was spring when they moved in, that must be
1924. Una developed scarlet fever, and
left for California to rest. Mary's mother arrived for a visit very
soon after the moved into the house. Then Bruce fell ill and left early
in the
summer. Mary and her mother spent that summer on the beach near Wŏnsan,
then,
the months passing without any news from her husband, she left with
their child
and her mother toward the end of the year, arriving in California via
Honolulu,
she says, in 1925 (presumably early in the year). Bruce grew ever
sicker,
suffering, it was finally discovered, “many months later” from tropical
sprue,
a disorder of the intestines. Their son was only 6, yet she put him in
a
boarding school and attended the California School of Fine Arts (she
was an
artist, the book contains many of her drawings). She speaks of “many
months”
passing, during which time (1925? 1926?) a telegram from Bill arrived:
“Dilkusha struck by
lightning, completely destroyed.” They had not thought to install a
lightning
condutor.

Even
supposing that they spent one whole
year there, or more, and she says they waited 5 months without her
husband’s
gastric trouble returning once he had been stabilized, Bruce’s return
to Korea
must have taken place in 1928 at the very latest. While he went back,
she went with her mother and little Bruce to England, where he was to
live
with her brother and attend school. She says that she spent “a few
uneasy
months” there before setting off on the return, via California and
Honolulu.
She affirms that she arrived in Yokohama on 14 September, 1930, “my
birthday.”
This is surely too long an absence; the date must have been September
1929, as
Faith Norris’s account says, and her sense of timing generally seems to
be
reliable, unlike Mary Taylor’s.

After a few days’ rest, Mary is taken up
to the garden of Dilkusha, where she expects to find a pile of debris. Instead,
she finds a rebuilt house, thanks to Bill. The house she entered was not yet
furnished, but was ready to be inhabited. Clearly, the basic outer structure
had survived, but the interior had been badly damaged.

Faith Norris says that the house had been
divided into two “rental housing” units, and that they rented space on the
upper floor in January 1929 and goes on to describe in great detail (p124) the
dreadful state of the house, with blocked fireplaces, damaged paneling, a floor
blocking the original staircase leading down, they had to use the bridge, etc.
Most unfortunately, there is no mention of lightning or fire, instead she
explains the state of the house by a preposterous tale according to which the
vandalizing had been done by Mary’s husband (she calls him Bill) in fury after
she had left him on account of his philandering with Korean women and gone back
to the States, only to telegram in May 1929 that she was coming back. She
arrived, says Faith, in September 1929 and at that time the Taylors moved into
the lower floor, which had previously been occupied by an Australian former
employee, Mr. Boydell, with his wife and son. The Taylor’s son, Faith claims,
had been left in a boarding school in San Francisco.

Now Faith Norris was only twelve at the
time. Still, how was it, we might wonder, that she got the story so completely
and unpleasantly wrong? In an illuminating phrase, she indicates that her
mother normally did not allow her to be present when they had visitors,
although she made an exception for Mary Taylor’s first visit because Faith was
so fascinated by her beauty. One must conclude, then, that we probably have
here another example of Joan’s propensity to prefer fable to fact, and also,
interestingly, another example of a tendency to think the worst of men, just as
she had claimed that her father only became headmaster because his father gave
so much money to the school.

Alas, Mary Taylor’s story passes over the
upstairs tenants in complete silence. She never mentions Joan Grigsby. Instead,
she tells how her family in England sent furnishings, including the “Linley
sisters’ dresses” and they slowly rebuilt their stock of Korean furniture. The
Taylor brothers had long been the owners of a “Curio Store” in Seoul which
dealt in such things, left in the hands of a manager, “Kim Chusa.” This very
highly cultivated man from the yangban class had been a friend of Yi Yŏng-ik,
and had been part of the first Korean delegation to Washington in the 1880s as
secretary and translator.

Faith believes that while she and her
father visited the Diamond Mountains (when? spring 1930?) her mother made a
hiking trip with Mary Taylor and Lilian Miller in Japan. This seems very
unlikely. Another dream-fable? She says that her mother went alone to the
Diamond Mountains in the summer of 1930.

The final years

Mary Taylor’s story hurtles over these
years, and we are suddenly at a time later in the 1930s when Bishop Trollope
(who died in 1932) has been dead for several years (p225). She sets out to take
the train to Europe across Siberia. Adventures do not lack, they are even
derailed once. After a year in England, she returns via San Francisco where she
finds many of the Russian refugees they had helped years before. Once back in
Korea, she goes on a visit to a new gold mine, a heroic journey with, again,
many adventures.

In December 1941 Bruce
and Mary, who were among the few foreigners who had refused to leave Korea, were
arrested immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mary was confined in
Dilkusha, Bruce with the men in Sŏdaemun prison. Then they were shipped to
Japan, and taken with many other foreign detainees to Lourenco Marques, a
neutral, Portuguese port in East Africa, and from there to the United States.
Before they could return, Albert Taylor died of a heart attack in 1948 at the
age of 51. Mary brought his
ashes back to Seoul and they are buried near his father’s grave in the
Foreigners’ Cemetery.

Faith Norris (p122) visited with Mary and
Una in Mendocino, California, in about 1980, when Mary was ninety. Despite
everything she had been through, she still had copies of three of Joan Grigsby’s
poetry books! She died in 1982, aged 93. She too had written her memoirs, which
were published after her death. Her son has also written his memoirs, they have not yet been published.